Nisour Square Witness: “Blackwater Had Power Like Saddam Hussein”

Photo: AP

Justin King

WASHINGTON, DC – The sentencing hearing for four Blackwater contractors produced one life sentence and three 30-year sentences, but the legal battles are probably far from over for the four men convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqis in 2007.

The defense brought in character witnesses and attempted to play on the military records of the former contractors. The prosecution paraded witnesses to the shooting and pointed out the complete lack of remorse or acceptance of responsibility on the part of the defendants. In the end, the judge sentenced the men to the mandatory minimum sentences.

While the chain of events leading up to the shooting is still unclear, due in part to a suspected cover up by the US State Department, what is known is that the four men opened fire in a crowded square in Baghdad and that some of the victims were shot while fleeing the scene. Prosecutors called it a wartime atrocity.

Blackwater Builds Foreign Mercenary Force in UAE

Editor's Note: What could possibly go wrong with rogue private forces being used as secret police of the crown?

Blackwater chopper - AFP File image

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The crown prince of Abu Dhabi has hired the founder of private security firm Blackwater Worldwide to set up an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the United Arab Emirates, the New York Times said Sunday.

The Times said it obtained documents that showed the unit being formed by Erik Prince's new company Reflex Responses with $529 million from the UAE would be used to thwart internal revolt, conduct special operations and defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from attack.

The newspaper said the decision to hire the contingent of foreign troops was taken before a wave of popular unrest spread across the Arab world in recent months, including to the UAE's Gulf neighbors Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia.

The UAE itself has seen no serious unrest. Most of its population is made up of foreign workers.

Blackwater, which once had lucrative contracts to protect U.S. officials in Iraq, became notorious in the region in 2007 when its guards opened fire in Baghdad traffic, killing at least 14 people in what the Iraqi government called a "massacre."

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Blackwater’s New Ethics Chief: John Ashcroft

Ashcroft Wikimedia Image

Spencer Ackerman
Wired

The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement, an entity designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private security industry.”

In other words, no more shooting civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan; no more signing for weapons itsguards aren’t authorized to carry in warzones; no more impersonations of cartoon characters to acquire said weaponry; and no more ‘roids and coke on the job.

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New US Security Appointments and The Dangerous Separation of State and Military

An actual corporate army for hire: Blackwater, now "Xe" resides in 
Dubai, the globalist gangster hideout of choice, to avoid extradition 
for their various accused crimes against humanity. Here they roam the
streets of New Orleans on corporate and government payrolls.

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Bangkok, Thailand April 29, 2011 - The latest game of Washington musical chairs expects to see General David Petraeus head the CIA while current CIA Director Leon Panetta is to take over Robert Gate's position as Secretary of Defense. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) astutely noted that this arrangement further blurs the lines between America's "intelligence community" and the role of the US Armed Forces.

To call the CIA an "intelligence agency" is entirely a misnomer. In reality, the CIA has become an extra-legal private military that has waged secret wars for decades. It has been recently augmenting its repertoire with pilotless drones to carry out air campaigns along the Afghan-Pakistani border. The CIA has also been involved in on-going military operations inside of Iran, Somalia, and now Libya. The CIA's ever expanding budget has long been categorized as "classified" and therefore entirely unaccountable to both the American tax payers and their so-called elected representatives.

The CFR's article, "Crumbling Wall Between the Pentagon and CIA" notes that the CIA's growing influence is due to "its greater integration with the military." This "greater integration" will engender the US military with less oversights and more secrecy as it expands its support for the CIA's growing role in waging global war.

Jeremy Scahill Testifies Before Congress on America's Secret Wars

Nation national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill today testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the US's shadow wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. His complete testimony is below.

The Nation

My name is Jeremy Scahill. I am the National Security correspondent for The Nation magazine. I recently returned from a two-week unembedded reporting trip to Afghanistan. I would like to thank the Chairman and the Committee for inviting me to participate in this important hearing. As we sit here today in Washington, across the globe the United States is engaged in multiple wars. Some, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, are well known to the US public and to the Congress.

They are covered in the media and are subject to Congressional review. Despite the perception that we know what is happening in Afghanistan, what is rarely discussed in any depth in Congress or the media is the vast number of innocent Afghan civilians that are being killed on a regular basis in US night raids and the heavy bombing that has been reinstated by General David Petraeus. I saw the impact of these civilian deaths first-hand and I can say that in some cases our own actions are helping to increase the strength and expand the size of the Taliban and the broader insurgency in Afghanistan.


As the war rages on in Afghanistan and--despite spin to the contrary--in Iraq as well, US Special Operations Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency are engaged in parallel, covert, shadow wars that are waged in near total darkness and largely away from effective or meaningful Congressional oversight or journalistic scrutiny. The actions and consequences of these wars is seldom discussed in public or investigated by the Congress.

The current US strategy can be summed up as follows: We are trying to kill our way to peace. And the killing fields are growing in number.

Among the sober question that must be addressed by the Congress: What impact are these clandestine operations having on US national security? Are they making us more safe or less? When US forces kill innocent civilians in "counterterrorism" operations, are we inspiring a new generation of insurgents to rise against our country? And, what is the oversight role of the US Congress in the shadow wars that have spanned the Bush and Obama Administrations?

The most visible among these shadow wars is in Pakistan where the United States regularly bombs the country using weaponized drones. As we now know from diplomatic cables made public by Wikileaks, Pakistan's Prime Minister told a senior US official in Islamabad, "I don't care if [the US bombs Pakistan] as long as they get the right people. We'll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it."

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Machines of War: Blackwater, Monsanto, and Bill Gates

Silvia Ribeiro
Pravda

A report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation (Blackwater's Black Ops, 9/15/2010) revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (now called Xe Services) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto. Blackwater was renamed in 2009 after becoming famous in the world with numerous reports of abuses in Iraq, including massacres of civilians. It remains the largest private contractor of the U.S. Department of State "security services," that practices state terrorism by giving the government the opportunity to deny it.

Many military and former CIA officers work for Blackwater or related companies created to divert attention from their bad reputation and make more profit selling their nefarious services-ranging from information and intelligence to infiltration, political lobbying and paramilitary training - for other governments, banks and multinational corporations. According to Scahill, business with multinationals, like Monsanto, Chevron, and financial giants such as Barclays and Deutsche Bank, are channeled through two companies owned by Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater: Total Intelligence Solutions and Terrorism Research Center. These officers and directors share Blackwater.

One of them, Cofer Black, known for his brutality as one of the directors of the CIA, was the one who made contact with Monsanto in 2008 as director of Total Intelligence, entering into the contract with the company to spy on and infiltrate organizations of animal rights activists, anti-GM and other dirty activities of the biotech giant.

Contacted by Scahill, the Monsanto executive Kevin Wilson declined to comment, but later confirmed to The Nation that they had hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and 2009, according to Monsanto only to keep track of "public disclosure" of its opponents. He also said that Total Intelligence was a "totally separate entity from Blackwater."

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State Dept. tried to hide Blackwater’s piece of $10 billion contract: report

Contract comes despite Sec. Clinton's pledge to ban 'private mercenary firms'

Daniel Tencer -- Raw Story 

The State Department has awarded part of a $10-billion embassy protection contract to the company formerly known as Blackwater, but you wouldn't know it by looking at government documents.


On Thursday, the State Department announced the winners of a tender to protect security services to diplomatic missions around the world, including the US's massive embassy in Iraq. The name Xe Services -- Blackwater's current name -- doesn't appear in the contract, but the name International Development Solutions does. 

Spencer Ackerman reports at Wired.com that International Development Solutions is a shell company set up by Blackwater in partnership with engineering firm Kaseman to run US Training Center, a Blackwater subsidiary.

"No one who looks at the official announcement of the contract award would have any idea that firm is connected to Blackwater," Ackerman writes.

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